CVE-2026-45447 — Heap Use-After-Free in the PKCS7_verify() Function

Description (CNA)

Issue summary: A specially crafted PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed message could trigger a use-after-free during PKCS#7 signature verification. Impact summary: A use-after-free may result in process crashes, heap corruption, or potentially remote code execution. When processing a PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed message, if the SignedData digestAlgorithms field is present as an empty ASN.1 SET, OpenSSL may incorrectly free a caller-owned BIO during PKCS7_verify(). A subsequent use of the BIO by the calling application results in a use-after-free condition. In the common case this occurs when the application later calls BIO_free() on the BIO originally passed to PKCS7_verify(). Depending on allocator behavior and application-specific BIO usage patterns, this may result in a crash or other memory corruption. In some application contexts this may potentially be exploitable for remote code execution. Applications that process PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed messages using OpenSSL PKCS#7 APIs may be affected. Applications using the CMS APIs for this processing are not affected. The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

Affected (CNA)

Vendor / product	Versions
OpenSSL / OpenSSL	affected 4.0.0 before 4.0.1; affected 3.6.0 before 3.6.3; affected 3.5.0 before 3.5.7; affected 3.4.0 before 3.4.6; affected 3.0.0 before 3.0.21; affected 1.1.1 before 1.1.1zh; affected 1.0.2 before 1.0.2zq

CWE

CWE-416

References

ADP enrichment

CISA-ADP

No English description supplied.

No references supplied.

redhat-SADP

A flaw was found in OpenSSL. When processing a specially crafted PKCS#7 or S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) signed message, a heap use-after-free vulnerability in the PKCS7_verify() function can be triggered. This occurs if the SignedData digestAlgorithms field is present as an empty ASN.1 SET, leading to incorrect memory deallocation. A remote attacker could exploit this to cause application crashes, memory corruption, or potentially achieve remote code execution.